fig1

Figure 1. In vitro and in situ competitive fitness assessment of 7 L. plantarum strains. (A) The 7 L. plantarum strains used in this study. The strains were selected based on their discriminating prebiotic utilization phenotypes for GOS and inulin, combined with the possibility for high-throughput population dynamics based on strain-specific intergenic alleles that can be assessed using next-generation amplicon sequencing (for details, see ref^[41,42]); (B) The strain-specific L. plantarum population shifts observed relative to the 7-strain inoculum mixture after 72 generations (generations are here defined as divisions of the overall seven strain population, and thus does not equal the number of generations of an individual strain in the seven strain mixture) of growth in a laboratory medium that contained GOS and inulin as a sole carbon source for growth, revealing considerable enrichment of at least some of the prebiotic utilizing L. plantarum strains by outcompeting non-utilizing strains; (C) The L. plantarum strain-specific population compositions observed in fecal samples obtained 7 days post-gavage, in comparison to the population composition of the 7-strain gavaged mixture, in rats that were fed a high-calcium control diet or the same diet supplemented with the prebiotic GOS or inulin. No significant population composition changes occurred during these 7 days in the intestinal tract, irrespective of the diet fed to the rats. L. plantarum: Lactiplantibacillus plantarum; GOS: galacto-oligosaccharides.